As people continue to protest social injustice and exercise their freedom of speech, author Tyler Merritt wrote a book that examines how stereotypes impact the Black community’s ability to be seen as equals.
Merritt spoke with Blavity about his upbringing and how his experiences as a 6-foot-2 Black man in America inspired his new book, I Take My Coffee Black: Reflections on Tupac, Musical Theater, Faith, and Being Black in America. In his book, Merritt discusses racial bias and the societal restrictions and limitations of the First Amendment.
“As a Black American, you learn very quickly that the First Amendment does not always apply to you. Not really,” he wrote in his book. “If you are a Black man, you must learn restraint. Or, you will pay the price. Black people cannot be like Karens in a Wal-Mart. That’s how you get the police called on you. And that’s how you end up dead.”
During his conversation with Blavity, Merritt pointed to voter suppression in the Black community, speaking specifically about lawmakers “working day and night” to restrict voters.
Aware of his appearance — a Black man with a graying beard, a tall stature and long locs — Merritt decided to take the character traits of Mister Rogers from the long-running children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and use it as a metaphor to describe his aspirations for his legacy amid racial injustice.
“Mister Rogers has this weird, universal thing about who he was,” Merritt told Blavity, adding that Mister Rogers’ impact transcended generations. “As you dig deeper into who he was, how he fought for the rights of all kids … when I was looking at something to kind of mirror that, I landed on Mister Rogers.”
“It’s tied into a truth of, I wanna be somebody that when I die, people look at me and they say, ‘Yo, that dude loved everybody.’ And that’s how I feel about Mister Rogers. That’s how I feel about the matriarchs in our Black culture, that we don’t often get a chance to tell real stories about,” he continued, praising the impact of his Madea and the matriarchs of Black families.
During the conversation, Merritt also recalled growing up and realizing at the age of 8 that there were people who thought his “Blackness was a problem.”
While detailing an incident with a childhood friend, Merritt said he walked up to the house of a young boy whose parents wouldn’t let him inside.
“A white woman opened up the door and was just blatant on it, and just was like, ‘Yeah, Billy, you can come in. But your, uh, Negro friend can’t,'” Merritt said. “That’s the kind of stuff that you’d never forget. And I remember standing there being like, first of all, I’ve never heard ‘Negro’ used with a negative connotation.”
He said the experience was the beginning of him being hyperaware of his race in public but added that regardless of people’s perception of him and stereotypes about Black people, he chooses to be optimistic about the future.
